The sherry and biscuits were still being discussed when Mr. Podger, the undertaker, arrived, a broad, cheerfully sorrowful, clean-shaven little man, accompanied by a melancholy-faced assistant. He conversed for a time with Johnson in the passage outside; the sense of his business stilled the rising waves of chatter and carried off everyone's attention in the wake of his heavy footsteps to the room above. IV Things crowded upon Mr. Polly. Everyone, he noticed, took sherry with a solemn avidity, and a small portion even was administered sacramentally to the Punt boy. There followed a distribution of black kid gloves, and much trying on and humouring of fingers. "_Good_ gloves," said one of Mrs. Johnson's friends. "There's a little pair there for Willie," said Mrs. Johnson triumphantly. Everyone seemed gravely content with the amazing procedure of the occasion. Presently Mr. Podger was picking Mr. Polly out as Chief Mourner to go with Mrs. Johnson, Mrs. Larkins and Annie in the first mourning carriage. "Right O," said Mr. Polly, and repented instantly of the alacrity of the phrase. "There'll have to be a walking party," said Mrs. Johnson cheerfully. "There's only two coaches. I daresay we can put in six in each, but that leaves three over." There was a generous struggle to be pedestrian, and the two other Larkins girls, confessing coyly to tight new boots and displaying a certain eagerness, were added to the contents of the first carriage. "It'll be a squeeze," said Annie. "_I_ don't mind a squeeze," said Mr. Polly. He decided privately that the proper phrase for the result of that remark was "Hysterial catechunations." Mr. Podger re-entered the room from a momentary supervision of the bumping business that was now proceeding down the staircase. "Bearing up," he said cheerfully, rubbing his hands together. "Bearing up!" That stuck very vividly in Mr. Polly's mind, and so did the close-wedged drive to the churchyard, bunched in between two young women in confused dull and shiny black, and the fact that the wind was bleak and that the officiating clergyman had a cold, and sniffed between his sentences. The wonder of life! The wonder of everything! What had he expected that this should all be so astoundingly different.